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This paper describes the role of sense of place in students' analysis of spatial data toward understanding the distribution of financial services in their city. High school students participated in a 10-session module about their city's two-tiered financial system of banks and alternative financial institutions. The paper analyzes two class sessions organized around the use of ratios, or intensive variables, to understand the distribution: an embodied distribution activity atop a large floor map and individual exploration of scalable, data-rich digital maps. Analysis investigates the role of students' sense of place as they grappled with these ratios. Students drew on their senses of place to interpret data and generate their own sets to associate in ratios. Abstract measures and data visualizations contained in the digital maps were less accessible to students in this iteration of the module. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excerpted from a larger project on the moral culture of American teens during the first year after high school graduation, this paper summarizes results from 125 in-depth interviews with American teens and one-year of field research. It reports on the ubiquity of teen employment, the character and context of teen work, the American teen lifestyle and its impact on teen money use and general economic life of teens, the distinct leisure preferences of teens, the impact teen leisure preference have on teen work patterns and money behaviors, and the ways teens adjust their work, money, and leisure practices during the first year after high school. Particular attention is given to similarities and differences across gender, race, and class, and to the role of socializing agents such as the family, religion, and local community. This paper argues: 1) that most American teens view work as a necessary nuisance, money as a lifestyle essential, and leisure as a purchased commodity, 2) that most American teens are blinded to their conformity to these American patterns of consumption, and 3) that American teens have learned these patterns from their families, their religious communities, and their local communities -- not because these communities send these messages explicitly, but do so implicitly as they pattern their own behaviors along these lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a debate about current and possible future trajectories of Affirmative Action. The author examines de facto participation of foreign nationals in Affirmative Action. The focus is on postsecondary faculty who are foreign nationals and who do not fit into traditional minority categories. The general hypothesis is that some of these neither protected, nor unprotected groups occupy a middle status in ethnic hierarchy of American education, and as such, fulfill the function of middleman minorities. This paper examines: the employment trajectories of teaching faculty who are foreign nationals; their position within traditionally black-white Affirmative Action debate; discriminatory exclusionary practices they may experience. The research employs different methods: secondary analysis of the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty; regression analysis; qualitative case studies. The study suggests to explore "situational racism" - exclusion based on a situational white versus black power distribution. The study urges the attention to some ambiguously positioned groups, especially in the light of growing societal ethnic heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pivotal idea in this paper is that prevailing notions of childhood have changed over time in the U.S. Specifically, I show that changes have occurred in parent behaviors regarding cognitive development of their young children and argue the growing trend in the parenting of cognitive development in young children in the latter half of the 20th century is largely attributable to the institutionalization of mass schooling. This paper examines parenting cognitive development from 1951 to 2001 in four ways. First I briefly review three related literatures: 1) the sociological literature on changes in parenting in the U.S. during the 20th century; 2) the research literature on changes in the U.S. during the 20th century in expert literature to parents on cognitive development of children; and, 3) the research literature on parental involvement in schooling. Next, I present analysis of data on parents from Patterns of Childrearing 1951-52, the Detroit Area Study 1963, and the National Household Education Surveys 1991 and 2001 to show the changes in parent behaviors around the cognitive development of their children in the U.S. in the 50 year span from 1951 to 2000. Third, I demonstrate the changing impact of household income and mother?s education as evidence of the overall influence of mass education on norms and behaviors of parents. Finally, I describe the normative nature of parenting cognitive development by the beginning of the 21st century using the National Household Education Survey 1991, 1993, 1996, 1999, and 2001 and speculate on its implications for the sociologies of parenting and education, as well as a neo-institutional analysis of schooling. The results show parents increasingly spend time more time engaging in activities related to cognitive development over the second half of the 20th century so that by 1991 it is normative behavior. In addition, mother?s education becomes an increasingly better predictor of parenting cognitive development over the latter half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goode (1962) argues that at the start of modern society the upper classes will have higher divorce rates, but as divorce procedures are gradually made available to all classes this differences will dwindle away. Since family strain towards the lower strata is greater, the proportion of lower strata divorces will increase, and eventually Goode expects an inverse relation between class and divorce rate. The partly contradicting results on this relation between class and divorce risk ask for a more systematic, cross-national and cross-cohort analysis of the relation between education and divorce and separation. This will be the first aim of this paper. We use multi-level analysis to analyze this relation in various countries in Europe and the USA. We analyze this relation for both all unions (whatever their juridical form) and for the married couples only (with or without cohabitation). The second aim of this paper is to explain these cross-national and cross-cohort differences in the relation between education and divorce/separation by (changes in) state regulations of marriage and divorce, social policies, the level of female full time labor market participation and the general acceptance of divorce. We use the files of the Fertility and Family Survey project. These data were collected during the 1990s. They are national representative samples of male and female respondents in Finland, Poland, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, West Germany, Sweden, USA and Greece. Final results will be presented at the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews prior work on the media and discusses two approaches. The first focuses primarily on the content of media and assumes that children passively consume such content. In this view the media directly affects children (positively or negatively). In the second approach children are seen as active agents who appropriate and use media content in their lives. This paper extends prior research in line with the second approach as children as active consumers, by focusing on children spontaneous references and uses of media in their peer cultures in preschool and elementary school settings in the United States and Italy. The study find that children have complex knowledge of the media, use it in their collective peer routines, and that the use of media can contribute to children?s development of literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern education emerged in the long modern century stretching from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Many accounts of modern education assert that its goals, structure, content and functions were essentially identical across all modern societies. This paper argues, to the contrary, that at least six distinctive patterns of modern education emerged, each reflecting their unique temporal and spatial context and the nature to the ideological, economic, and political changes that accompanied their birth and systematization. These patterns are the Prussian, French, English, American, Japanese, and Russian approaches to modern education. The paper first seeks to describe the process of emergence of these respective systems, and then it reflects on some of the implications for institutional theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores selectively the thought of Pierre Bourdieu with attention to images of capital acquisition and conversion in order to conceptualize the career and scholarly work conditions of American academics employed as professors in major research universities. Much has been written about the terrains of higher education, viewed sociologically, psychologically, anthropologically, and politically. Yet, few scholarly contributions have examined the contexts of professors' work relative to their support for or constraint upon knowledge production as a desirable social aim. Although concerns have been raised about the applicability of Bourdieu's work to settings beyond the specific context of French higher education, it is possible to use his writings as opportunities to explore academic contextual issues (with attention to contextual constraint) in generic ways and relative to their resonance with American higher education. The paper capitalizes on these opportunities to frame the content of professors' scholarly careers and the "social sites" that shape their knowledge production efforts. The paper employs Bourdieu's ideas to address this aim, due to his concern with the social and cultural contexts -- and power dynamics -- that frame lives, individually and collectively, in institutions and in society more broadly. The paper closes with a set of ideas drawn from the works of social, sociocultural, and cognitive psychologists to consider possibilities for supporting scholarly learning, even within contexts of constraint as outlined by Bourdieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the application of Tzur's (2007) fine-grained assessment to the design of an assessment measure of a particular multiplicative scheme so that non-interview, good enough data can be obtained (on a large scale) to infer into elementary students' reasoning. We outline three design principles that surfaced through our recent effort to devise a sequence of items to assess at which stage--participatory or anticipatory--a child might have constructed the multiplicative double counting (mDC) scheme (Tzur et al., 2013). These principles include the nature and sequencing of prompts, number choice, and authenticity of responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer scientists have reported on "computational thinking," which Aho (2012) defines as thought process involved in formulating problems so their solutions can be represented as computational steps and algorithms" (p. 832). We wanted to investigate such thinking in mathematics. To study this, we interviewed five mathematicians about the role of computation their work, and the notion of "algorithmic thinking" developed from these interviews. We foun mathematicians value this thinking, and in this paper we define algorithmic thinking and prese number of applications and affordances of such thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes to use communalism, an asset-driven strategy effective with Black learners, with racially mixed study groups. This study found that students who studied in racially mixed groups performed better when told that individuals would receive a reward for scoring the highest in their group. Also, the White students' perceptions of how much they mattered differed based on the racial composition of the study groups where those studying with only White students felt they mattered more than those who studied with White and Black participants. Implications of the importance to have culturally relevant and responsive resources for racially diverse classrooms are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study investigates preservice teachers' perceptions of real-world problems; their beliefs about teaching real-world contexts, especially ones sociopolitical in nature; and their ability to pose meaningful real-world problems. In this paper we present cases of three preservice teachers who participated in interviews that probed their thinking about real-world problems, and asked them to create problems they would consider using in their future classrooms. We use the three cases to propose a potential trajectory for preservice teachers from ambivalence to certainty about teaching mathematics through real-world and controversial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The calculus concepts of concavity and inflection points are often given meaning through the shape or curvature of a graph. However, there appear to be deeper core ideas for these two concepts, though the research literature has yet to give explicit attention to what these core ideas might be or what it might mean to "understand" them. In this paper, I propose a framework for the concavity and inflection point concepts, using the construct of covariation, wherein I propose conceptual (as opposed to mathematical) definitions that can be used for both research and instruction. I demonstrate that the proposed conceptual definitions in this framework contain important implications for the teaching and learning of these concepts, and that they provide more powerful insight into student difficulties than more traditional graphical interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study I investigate Saldanha and Thompson's (1998) claim that conceptualizing a coordinate pair in the Cartesian coordinate system as a multiplicative object, a way to unite two quantities' values, supports students in conceptualizing graphs as emergent representations of how two quantities' values change together. I presented three university precalculus students with an animated task showing varying values of two quantities along the axes and asked each student to sketch a graph of how the two quantities changed together. In this paper I document the difficulty students encountered when they did not conceptualize a coordinate pair as a multiplicative object. I address why the convention of "over x and up y" inhibits students from constructing a coordinate pair as a multiplicative object and I provide recommendations for supporting students in constructing coordinate pairs as multiplicative objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers what students attend to as they first encounter R³ coordinate axes and are asked to graph y = 3. Graphs are critical representations in single and multivariable calculus, yet findings from research indicate that students struggle with graphing functions of more than one variable. We found that some students thought y = 3 in R³ would be a line, while others thought it would be a plane. In creating their graphs, students attended to equidistance, parallelism, specific points, and the role of x and z. Students' use of these ideas was often generalised from thinking about the graphs of y = b equations in R². A key finding is that the students who thought the graph was a plane always attended to the z variable as free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines recent and contemporary responses by U.S. university administrators to the volume and legal challenges surrounding on-campus and in-residence peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic. Since the earliest days of online P2P activity, universities have served as key flashpoints in the broader file-sharing and intellectual property debates. But while there has been considerable policy attention to the emerging file-sharing case law, and some attention to the shifting legal and political strategies of IP holders most affected by P2P traffic (or most aggressive in asserting their rights), the multiple, frequently ambivalent, and highly varied responses of university network administrators have for the most part escaped sustained attention. This paper draws on survey, interview, and ethnographic data to explore the distinctive and heterogeneous policy sets put together by campus network administrators and decision-makers in dealing with IP issues associated with on-campus file-sharing practice. Such institutional policy sets constitute a crucial and understudied border zone between law and culture, functioning as: a) key translation points through which external IP claims get filtered (e.g., DMCA take-down notices); b) key micro-regimes through which a substantial amount of IP regulation is practically accomplished; and c) key laboratories for digital citizenship, through which the moral, cultural, and practical terrain of IP and file-sharing practice in a densely networked world are set. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with disabilities are a large and growing minority population in the United States. As with all minority groups, people with physical disabilities confront unequal status and opportunities compared to the majority group. The pervasive oppression against people with disabilities is known as ableism. This paper will use W.E.B. Du Bois's concepts to explore the experiences and treatment of people with physical disabilities. Du Bois is particularly suited for the exploration of disability and ableism because of his approach to the study of race and racism's impact on African-Americans. Accordingly, this paper will begin by evaluating three key concepts addressed in The Souls of Black Folk: the veil, double consciousness, and twoness. The paper will next apply Du Bois's ideas of the veil and double consciousness to the experiences and treatment of people with physical disabilities. Following will be an analysis of these two ideas to explain the twoness of people with physical disabilities in American society. Finally, the paper will analyze the main ideas and arguments made by Du Bois about African-American education in "Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?" to address the current debate about whether or not people with physical disabilities should be "mainstreamed" in the education system in light of their twoness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As public funding for higher education has declined, the costs of higher education have risen dramatically, including sharp increases in technology costs. At the same time, college education has become more universally available—and more critical to individuals' economic success—and public institutions must accommodate a broader and more diverse array of students. This paper outlines the economic, demographic, and public policy environment for public higher education, arguing that campus governance structures are ill-prepared to respond to this changing context. The paper examines the impact of this changed environment for faculty work and morale, including implications for the field of sociology, and makes the case that universities must adapt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a sample of 523 institutions of higher education in the United States to test neoinstitutional and diffusion explanations for curricular change. It explores the adoption of programs and majors in women's studies, Asian American studies, and queer/LGBT studies through logistic regression analysis and network visualization. The paper finds less support than expected for conventional neoinstitutional and diffusion explanations while determining that the institutionalization of a discipline in the higher education field increases the role for neoinstitutional pressures. In addition, the paper finds that peer networks based on structural position with the higher education field play less of a role in curricular change than do those peers claimed by institutions as comparison institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of rising income inequality nationally, states within the different regions of the United States have been converging on higher levels of inequality since the late 1970's. Using QCA (Qualitative Comparative Analysis) this paper explores the question of whether rising income inequality has been reached by way of distinct regional (or state-level) paths or is rising inequality more accurately described as a product of national-wide transformations. This paper finds that overall economic restructuring, decreases in labor power, and changes in returns to education have played a prominent and consistent role in increasing income inequality nationally since the 1970s. Increases in female-headed households impacted states nationwide in the 1980s, but appears to be declining in prominence as an inequality increasing factor in the 1990s. Regional differences in welfare state generosity may have become more influential in the 1990s as inequality increases nationally. It is argued that there is a case to be made for distinct regional dynamics explaining variations in regional income inequality in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it appears that by the 1990s states have experienced substantial convergence in terms of the factors driving increasing income inequality. In other words, by the 1990s there appear to be no regionally specific flows driving inequality, rather economic restructuring with concomitant decreases in unions has become a national inequality increasing phenomena. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and other national data sets indicate that Latino students in the United States are more likely to drop out of school compared to whites and other ethnic minority groups. Research on the effects of ability grouping on educational outcomes have consistently found that students in non academic track locations experience lower levels of both achievement as well as attainment outcomes. Yet, few researchers have studied the effects of tracking on the educational outcomes of Latino students. This paper invokes survival analysis methodology to analyze the effects of non academic track location on dropping out using data from the Latino sub sample of the National Education Longitudinal Study (N=1858). Here, I analyze students' hazard rate of dropping out in each grade 8 through 12. Results from semi parametric Cox proportional hazards models indicate that Latino students in non academic track locations experience higher hazard rates for the event of interest, dropping out, compared to Latinos in academic track locations. Further, this paper shows that while the hazard rate of dropping out tends to fall as these students progress through higher grades and continue to be in non academic track locations, it remains high throughout. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, Americans have seen an increased investment in social capital by the United States government, particularly as it pertains to higher education. The Federal Government has attempted to ameliorate many of its discriminatory and racist practices that have continually subjugated minorities to the lowest rungs of society as evidenced by the 1965 Higher Education Act and subsequent amendments. It is my contention that social capital is strongly correlated to educational attainment. Thus, because Latinos and African Americans have historically been discriminated against in their pursuit of higher education; their access to social capital has been severely limited. Furthermore, we argue that the current disproportionate federal funding of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) compared to Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) is due directly to the de facto segregation historically encountered by Latinos. The practice of de facto segregation is much more subversive than the de jure segregation encountered by African Americans. As a result, the federal government continues to discriminate against Latinos by disproportionately investing more in HBCUs than HSIs, thus, reducing the educational attainment and social capital for Latinos. This paper illustrates how the differences in federal appropriations disproportionately affect Latinos and how this disproportion relates to social capital. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to draw broad comparisons between marriage patterns by race, by education, and by religion in the U.S. over time. I use census data for race and education, and a variety of data sources for religious intermarriage. The comparative approach allows several general conclusions. First, racial endogamy has declined sharply over the 20th century, but race is still the most powerful division in the marriage market. Second, higher education has little effect on racial endogamy for blacks and whites. Third, religious endogamy has declined over time but the decline predates 1970 and therefore can only be appreciated by comparing different data sources. Fourth, the pattern of educational assortative mating has not changed much since 1940. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will attempt to use a sociological lens to investigate the particular institution of American public schooling. The use of a sociological method of investigation necessitates that the researcher look beyond the perfunctory and stated goals of the institution of study and attempt to render clear the hidden and powerful goals that guide the institution's operation away the light of judgment. In this case the institution of investigation has a long and varied history. American public schooling has in some ways and for some citizens, been a triumph of democracy and equality for the citizenry. In other ways and for other citizens, public schooling acted as a gatekeeper - condemning most students from lower social class homes to the same economic lives as their parents and at the same time guiding students from higher social class families into the economic arena of their parents. Using C. Wright Mills distinction of troubles, which, "occur within the character of the individual and…have to do with his self," and issues, which, "have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual…They have to do with the organization of many," it becomes apparent that the social reproduction is very much an issue and must be investigated as such and confronted as such (Mills, 1959, 8). How has history so changed an institution, which Freeman Butts described as an "unflagging search for freedom," founded to be a tool to promote economic and social mobility, into quite the opposite? (Butts, 1971, 50) ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, disability has become one of the most salient and researched outcomes for older adults in the United States. It is predominantly conceptualized as a life course process and is increasingly measured over time using either transitions or trajectories. In this paper, I extend this research by exploring the pathways through which socioeconomic status affects disability as a life course process. Previous theory and research on SES and health suggests that education and financial resources work through both shared and independent mechanisms. I find that mediators do differ in their impact on education and income effects, and differ for disability onset and growth over time. I discuss these findings in terms of past and future research, focusing on what may be gained by focusing on disability as a life course process made up of transitions within trajectories. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the impact that educational institutions and family memory have on Mexican Americans' racial identity formation. Based on original research, I use interviews with twenty-nine three-generation Mexican American families in California (sixty-seven total interviews) to answer the questions: how does the educational system treat second and third generation Mexican Americans? How does this treatment influence what it means to be Mexican American? How do parents' experiences with school shape their ideologies and practices regarding their children's education? Using a family-oriented "racial-generational approach," I seriously investigate the linkages between the first (immigrant), second, and third generations. I make three inter-related arguments. First, educational institutions discriminate according to race in a manner befitting the particular historical moment ("Jim Crow" style segregation in the second generation and institutional discrimination in the third generation). Second, I document how family beliefs and practices concerning education are transferred inter-generationally in a family. Finally, I suggest that each generation crafts it's own racial identity strategy that is born of the twin influences of family history and historical moment. Highlighting the experiential level, I demonstrate how the significant sociological concepts of race, identity, and culture are created through the institutions of family and society, in conjunction with historical social movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The great increase in the number of students from immigrant families in U.S. classrooms has prompted researchers to closely examine their educational achievement patterns. Past research predominantly focused on the educational achievement of adolescent immigrants in secondary and postsecondary institutions, while largely ignoring the learning of younger immigrant students. There is a need for studying the educational performance of immigrant children at the earliest stages of schooling. Recent research finds that learning disadvantages that develop early on in formal education persist thorough out an individual's educational career, and impacts how far they will pursue education. For immigrant children possibilities of upward socioeconomic mobility may be greatly shaped by disadvantages that emerge at the earliest stages of schooling. This paper makes use of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study -Kindergarten Cohort to study how the factors of race, English usage at home, and immigrant generational status impact the educational preparedness and achievement of immigrant children. Preliminary findings indicate the factors of generational status and English usage at home impact the educational performance of Latino and Asian immigrant children in different manners. This study provides evidence that may offer support for theoretical frameworks employed to understand how immigrants integrate into American society. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latino students currently have the highest dropout rates of any population subgroup in the United States. This paper seeks to combine the literature on language assistance classes and tracking in a multi-level modeling framework in order to find an answer to how individual and contextual variables differentially explain why Latino students drop out of high school. I use data from the first three waves of the National Education Longitudinal Study for the Latino sub-sample of 1387 students nested within 393 schools. My hypothesis is that Latinos who have taken language assistance classes prior to 8th grade are more likely to drop out of high school primarily due to tracking in non academic classes. The preliminary findings suggest that language assistance classes may have a negative effect on the probability of dropping out of high school - especially for students who attend urban schools with gang conflicts. A tentative conclusion from these results is tha t contrary to the stated hypothesis, having had taken language assistance classes prior to 8th grade may in fact arm Latino students with some skills and/or resources which deter them from eventually dropping out of high school. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the educational praxis that developed a partnership between the University of California, Santa Barbara, schools, and local Latino communities to improve the academic preparation of historically underserved Latino students, strengthen Latino families' funds of knowledge about schools, improve the delivery of educational services in the schools, enhance leadership among first generation college students, and positively impact university and local school policy. This project draws on a public sociology perspective related to Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy (1970, 1994) where community empowerment is necessary to "right" "wrongs" and to enable community members to assert control of their families' well-being in contexts where power relations exclude or don't pay enough attention to their voices and concerns. The project, "ENLACE y Avance: Students and Families Empowered for Success," is funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and UCSB. I begin by contextualizing the need for this partnership by discussing the educational status of Latinos, some of the barriers to educational success Latinos experience, the need for thoughtful university participation in local community education, and the ways in which a public sociology framework can help activate some of the resources across these diverse constituencies in ways that promote university engagement with the local community and help empower Latino students and families. the importance of enacting a pedagogy of engagement in reshaping education to validate the community orientation of many students, particularly those from racial-ethnic minorities, including Latinos. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine mothers' reasons for homeschooling. Drawing from a four-year ethnographic study of homeschoolers in the Pacific Northwest, I present the ways mothers explained why they rejected conventional schooling for their children. I find that their motivations fell within one single vocabulary of motive: good mothering. Every mother's reasons reflected deep concern for her child, thus her choice was framed, first and foremost, as a parenting decision. I conclude by theoretically discussing how mothers understood their homeschooling choice within the contradictory cultural context of what it means to be a good mother in the contemporary United States. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a comparative framework to examine patterns in gender disparities in educational attainment over time for Whites, Blacks, Mexican-Americans, and Puerto-Rican Americans, from 1960-2000. An examination of U.S. Census data reveals that while the gender gaps and patterns are not uniform across all four groups, a female advantage in both college and high school graduation is evident for all groups by 2000. Among African-Americans, females have consistently attained more education overall than their male counterparts since 1960; the phenomenon is more recent for Latinos and Whites. The aggregate data patterns lend some support to explanations focusing on the role of gender role socialization, and teachers' gendered and racialized expectations and treatment of students. In addition, findings of an analysis of trends in female-headed households over the same period suggest that part of the growing female advantage may be due to changing family formation patterns and a differential negative effect for boys of growing up without a father present. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Immigration Act of 1965, the flow of immigrants to the United States has shifted away from European countries and is now primarily from Asian and Latin American countries. During this time, economic restructuring has made it more difficult for low-skilled and less-educated workers to find employment in stable, high-quality jobs. Some immigrants have responded to the economic context in the United States through participation in ethnic economies, which provide job opportunities that are not available to them in the mainstream economy. Beyond the advantages or disadvantages of ethnic economy participation for immigrants themselves, little research has investigated the intergenerational impact of ethnic economies. Some research suggests that ethnic economies can act as a springboard for the second generation-encouraging youth to go on to higher education by increasing social capital and reinforcing high educational aspirations. Other research has suggested that the ethnic economy can act as a safety net, giving youth possibilities of employment without obtaining a college degree.I n this paper, I assess the impact of parents' ethnic economy participation on children's educational aspirations and post-secondary school enrollment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the GSS complete file (1972-2004), the paper examines the role of education, age, and cohort in explaining attitudes toward economic and social inequality. First, in general, Americans become more economically conservative as they age, though they also grow more tolerant and liberal on issues of free speech and racial discrimination. Second, educational attainment is associated, albeit somewhat weakly, with increasingly conservative economic dispositions. Third, the effect of age on attitudes toward economic redistribution varies across educational groups: while all Americans become increasingly more conservative, the slope for those with more education rises more sharply than it does for Americans with at most a high school diploma. This effect is mitigated somewhat by income, though not entirely. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dual-language programs are noteworthy within the context of U.S. public education because in them the children of immigrants are essential assets. Language-minority and English-speaking pupils are grouped together, starting in kindergarten or earlier and extending at least through grade five, with a goal of bilingual proficiency and biliteracy for all. This paper explores dual-language educators' and parents' responses to California Proposition 227, which severely restricted bilingual education. Given this obstacle, what has motivated the maintenance and further initiation of dual-language programs? And to what ends? Answers hinge on varied institutional climates at the school district level and parent-teacher activism towards the goal of truly multicultural education. Rather than deter the dual-language movement, Proposition 227 has strengthened it by compelling very careful planning and monitoring. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mexican American population has the lowest level of educational attainment among racial/ethnic groups in the United States. In fact that the dropout rate of Mexican Americans has not changed much over the last 25 years. While there has been an increase of research seeking to understand and alleviate the dropout rate of Mexican Americans, relatively little research has been conducted at the aggregate level. This study draws on various theoretical perspectives to explain variations in the dropout rate of native-born Mexican American youth across geographic areas of the United States. Data from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) are used to conduct the analysis based on 523 Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs). The results provide support for the five hypotheses. In particular, the dropout rate among native-born Mexican American youth is positively associated with the dropout rate of native-born adults and the rate of female headship, and negatively related to the hourly wage of high school graduates, the unemployment rate, and the relative size of the Mexican-origin population. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for the formation of policies and programs to reduce the dropout rate of Mexican American youth. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of peace and conflict studies is still coalescing, despite the fact that the first undergraduate degree program in the United States was established in 1948. Almost sixty years later, the field still goes by so many names that core identity issues have not been resolved. The names of degree programs reveal various foci: peace studies; justice studies; conflict studies; conflict analysis; conflict resolution; conflict management; conflict transformation; and dispute resolution. This paper recounts the history of the field's development, and then charts and analyzes the curricular content of undergraduate degree programs in the United States and Canada. This is accomplished through analysis of the curricular requirements for those degree programs, as well as through comparative analysis of the syllabi for the required courses in those programs. This data allows us to identify whether and if core constructs have been established in this emerging discipline, and the degree of coherence that may be present in the field. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To measure true intergenerational mobility, the status of the first generation must be compared to their children, the second generation, when they reach a comparable age of maturity some 25 to 30 years later. Due to data limitations, researchers instead often use a cross-section of immigrant generations to then draw misleading longitudinal interpretations. Questions have also been raised about differences between the 2nd and 2.5 generations. More specifically, observed intergenerational progress of the 2nd and 2.5 generations may differ by gender and by the gender of the 1st generation parent they are compared to. This paper reports new findings from a broad study of the temporal dynamics of assimilation in the U.S. A new model design is developed that links 1970 and 1998-2002 data to probe more deeply the process of intergenerational mobility, using indicators of educational attainment and poverty status. Among the questions addressed are how much has the second generation in 2000 closed the gap with a third or higher generation reference group compared to the gap experienced by their "parents" in 1970 and how does the relative progress of the second generation vary between those with one immigrant parent and two immigrant parents? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act has increased the role of assessments in tracking the progress and achievement of children. There has also been an increased interest in the reporting of student outcomes by family background, particularly family socio-economic status. Though much has been written in the sociological literature about the measurement and conceptualization of socio-economic status, disagreement still exists. The problem is even more acute with regard to measuring a student's socio-economic status, particularly when parents can not be queried, which is often the case on educational assessments. In this paper I discuss the ways in which socio-economic status has been conceptualized and some of the issues related to measuring socio-economic status of students. Possible unobtrusive measures are also presented along with a call for further research into the construct validity of student-specific measures of socio-economic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]